


Initially

by Ray_Writes



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Barry's a hopeless romantic dork, F/F, Iris West Is An Awesome Sister, Laurel and Nyssa are Relationship Goals, M/M, Oliver's not much better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-07 19:42:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8813755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ray_Writes/pseuds/Ray_Writes
Summary: Barry has a bad habit of letting his attention wander in sixth period math class. Maybe if Oliver Queen didn't sit two rows ahead of him it wouldn't be such a problem.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SwiftEmera](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SwiftEmera/gifts).



> Written for the wonderful SwiftEmera aka Amie's birthday! Enjoy!

If anyone in the grade were to have to use one word to describe junior Barry Allen, it would most certainly be some variation of “nerd”. Unless, of course, someone were to ask Iris West, his best friend and foster sister, who would instead use the term “adorkable”. Still, kind of a nerd. He studied hard, he was found far more often in the library with Cisco Ramon and Caitlin Snow or at the Science Club currently captained by senior Ray Palmer, and he was well-liked—if also pitied—by most of his teachers. Dr. Wells was always going on about what a bright future he had ahead of him, anyway.

But everyone had their off-days. Barry’s off-days were more like off-periods, sixth period to be exact. Sixth period Pre-Calculus, right in the lag of the day when lunch was settling heavily into his stomach and a part of him wanted nothing more than to lounge in his seat and not think about mathematics at all. He always kept his gaze facing forward rather than out the window or at the clock on the wall, but it wasn’t the board or Dr. McGee that held his attention.

No, it was the back of Oliver Queen’s head that claimed that honor. Oliver was a senior, but Barry had shared a number of classes with the older boy over the years due to him skipping grades in various subjects and Oliver being held back in others. It wasn’t that he wasn’t smart, he just didn’t seem to care all that much about trying, not that he really had to what with his parents being billionaires or something. Which made it all the more frustrating that without any effort whatsoever—he was just _sitting_ there, God—he made Barry, who _did_ need to try, not seem to care either.

They weren’t friends. Not really, not like in a hang-out-after-school kind of way. Oliver had his crowd and Barry had his, there wasn’t really a reason for them to hang out like that. They weren’t strangers, though. It wasn’t like some sad little cliché where Barry was the wallflower Oliver didn’t even know existed. They’d talked, worked on projects that mostly involved Barry working and Oliver watching him work while occasionally supplying something helpful. Which really kind of absolved Barry of any creepiness from his staring.

Not that it was creepy! It wasn’t like he bored two holes into the back of the other boy’s head for forty-five minutes. He just…looked and thought about things that weren’t math. Things that were actually far more about Oliver.

He didn’t even stare at him the whole time. A lot of it was spent doodling in the margins of his notebook, little scribbles and squiggles and hearts and his name in different fonts and Oliver’s name and sometimes his and Oliver’s names smushed together like _Barry Allen-Queen_ and—

“—Barry? Mr. Allen?”

Barry looked up sharply when a nudge of Iris’ elbow helped the fact sink in that _that was his actual name_. “Huh?”

“Could you please give us the answer to the problem on the board?”

“Uh…” Barry blinked a couple times, still trying to focus. He looked up at the writing already covering about three-fourths of the whiteboard and realized he’d completely stopped following along at some point. His cheeks started heating up as the seconds stretched on into minutes. “I don’t think I know it.”

“Really?” asked Dr. McGee in that way that didn’t actually sound like a question. “You seemed to be taking extensive notes.”

“Um,” he squeaked, flipping his notebook closed and shoving it in the desk out of sight. The tips of his ears were _burning_ now, he just knew it.

Of course it only got worse as a few of the students in the rows in front of them turned back to look at him. Including Oliver. He looked more amused than curious about Barry’s predicament, lips quirked in a half-smirk and eyebrows in a perfect arch—and he really needed to not stare when Oliver could _see_ that he was staring!

A tap of Iris’ pen on the desk directed his attention to her own notebook and he seized gratefully on the lifeline. “The, uh, the square root of five?”

Dr. McGee nodded. “Thank you, Miss West.”

Pretty much everyone in the class cracked up at that. Oliver looked like he was biting his lip to keep from joining them, which Barry did not stare at because he was too busy resisting the urge to hide his face in his hands.

“That’s enough,” their teacher reprimanded, and the snickers of his classmates mercifully died out. “Onto the next problem, shall we?”

“I’m ruined,” Barry moaned once they’d reached the relative safety of their lockers after class.

“Oh come on, Bear, it’s not that bad,” Iris said with a shake of the head.

“I cannot _believe_ I got caught spacing out like that today.”

“Well, maybe if you didn’t spend all your time in that class mooning over a certain somebody you wouldn’t have spaced out,” was his best friend’s recommendation.

Barry’s eyes went wide. “Wha-what are you talking about?”

“Barry.” Iris fixed him with a look that was half-teasing, half-serious. “You think I haven’t seen whose initials you keep adding to your little notebook monograms? I sit right next to you. It is painfully adorable how obvious you are.”

“I am not—oh my God,” Barry’s heart seemed to do a weird lurch in his chest as a sudden thought occurred to him. “My notebook.”

“What about it?”

He started digging frantically through his backpack. “It’s not here! I swear I put it away after- after—oh no.”

“Barry, calm down. Just think about where you last saw it,” Iris offered.

“I left it in the desk,” he said faintly. “I left it in the desk for anybody to find, oh my _God_.”

He threw his locker door closed with a slam and sprinted back down the hall. He still had three minutes to get back to Dr. McGee’s room and to seventh period.

His math teacher looked up from her desk as he came skidding to a stop just inside the door. “Sorry, Dr. McGee, I just left—oh no.”

“Is something wrong, Mr. Allen?”

The desk was empty.

\---

Oliver sat on his own in a corner of Study Hall, hunched over a notebook. It might have almost given him the appearance of actually studying for once. Three desks over Laurel had given up the pretense in favor of braiding Nyssa’s hair, otherwise she might have noticed that it wasn’t his handwriting contained within the pages.

Even if it did have his name all over it.

Tommy had spotted the red cover with its label of _MATH_ in big, block letters as they’d been leaving McGee’s classroom. “Hey, free study guide!” His friend had commented with a grin, grabbing it up.

“Isn’t that Allen’s?” He’d tried to make it sound casual, like he wasn’t aware that, yes, that was where Barry sat every day next to his foster sister.

“Which means it’s a good study guide.”

“Tommy, come on.” Oliver had pushed at his friend’s arm, making Tommy fumble the notebook. It had landed open, with the pages folding awkwardly, so Oliver had hurried to scoop it up and smooth the creases. But then his eyes had caught on a familiar pair of initials: his own, _OQ,_ inside a heart with another set, _BA_.

Oh.

“Ollie, you putting it back or what?” Tommy had asked, snapping him out of his stupor.

He’d shut the notebook and pulled it in closer to his chest. “I’ll just give it to him tomorrow. Listen, I’ll, uh, I’ll see you after school.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Now he flipped through page after page with a growing fascination. Up until about halfway through Unit Two Barry’s scribblings had taken on the form of random shapes, the occasional flower, and molecular structures he was pretty sure were completely accurate. Then the hearts had begun. And then the initials. And then…

Over and over again, scrunched into the margins, written in spirals or some improvised version of cursive, _Barry Allen-Queen_. Like the other boy had been testing it out, seeing how it looked put to paper.

He turned another page. Was that a sketch of himself from the back? It wasn’t like he often got that view so it was hard to be sure, but if it was him he wasn’t above saying he looked pretty good. No wonder Barry apparently thought about him all the time in math class.

Barry _thought_ about him. Wow. What did he even do with that?

Barry was…well, Barry. Kind of a dork and kind of adorable all at the same time. He’d wanted to hate him the first time they’d ever been paired on a project he was that ridiculously cute. And yet somehow he hadn’t. Couldn’t. In fact he’d had to fight himself not to show how badly he’d ended up liking the younger boy.

But was “kind of adorable” really something to go off of here? Oliver was a senior, he’d be graduating soon, and he didn’t really know Barry all that well outside of a school setting. True, he’d taken out girls in the lower grades who were practically strangers, but…

But what?

Oliver found himself watching Laurel and Nyssa again, the former now the one with her head resting on her arms while the latter, rather than braiding, seemed to be coming gentle fingers through the blonde strands. He’d rarely seen either of them more relaxed and happy.

Nyssa suddenly looked his way with a hard, defiant stare. He raised his hands in surrender, hoping the girl would be too content sitting with Laurel to come destroy him, then dropped his eyes back to the notebook.

 _Mr. Allen-Queen_ sat innocently surrounded by flowers and rainbows.

Oliver thought about it another moment, then realized he never really put much thought into this kind of stuff before. Why start now?

\---

Barry stopped dragging Iris along behind him as soon as he cleared the door to Dr. McGee’s room. Still no sign of his notebook. He’d been really hoping it’d just turn up. Aside from certain contents he was loathe to have made public, he really did need his notes for the test next week.

With slumped shoulders he dropped into his seat and tried not to wonder just where his missing notebook might have ended up.

“Hey,” said a familiar voice just behind him. Barry practically jumped out of his chair as he whirled around.

“Hey! I mean,” Barry worked to make himself sound less frantic and overjoyed at the sight of Oliver Queen standing by his chair, and dutifully ignored Iris rolling her eyes with a grin. “Hey.”

“I think you left this behind yesterday.”

It was official. He was in a nightmare or the world hated him or _something_ because Oliver was pulling out his math notebook with the red cover and every single little embarrassing daydream he’d ever doodled inside it.

“Um, thanks,” he stammered, barely managing to keep himself from snatching it right out of the older boy’s hands. “I- I was really worried I’d lost it.”

“I’ll bet.” Was that humor dancing in the other’s eyes? But Oliver just placed it onto Barry’s desk and continued up to his own. Maybe he’d just thought it was funny Barry was so obviously freaking out about a silly school notebook, maybe it was just him being friendly, maybe—

The pages. The pages were bent. Which meant the notebook had been opened at some point which meant it’d been _read_ which meant _oh no, oh no, oh no_.

One of the pages near the back that he hadn’t used yet looked deliberately dog-eared, and since Barry figured he was dead already anyway, he turned to it. There was a message in the margin in handwriting not his own.

_Want to see a movie? OAQ_

And then a seven-digit number.

Inside a lopsided heart.

“Um.” Barry gulped. Then he reached for Iris. “ _Um_.”

“What? Oh!” She looked about as shocked as he felt before meeting his eyes with an encouraging smile. “Well, it could’ve been a lot worse, right?”

“Is he—” Barry had to check to make sure he was whispering as opposed to shouting, which is what he felt like doing. “Is he asking me out?”

“What do you _think_ he’s doing?”

“I don’t know! I mean what’s up with the _A_? I could have sworn his middle name started with a _J_ , like John or Jonah or something—”

“Barry.” Iris looked like she was trying not to laugh at him now. “ _AQ_ ,” she said, pointing out each letter. “ _Allen-Queen_.”

There were no words for the inarticulate sound that came out of his mouth. Barry’s eyes darted up to the front of the room—and Oliver was looking right back at them over his shoulder, like he’d been watching the whole thing play out. Oh God, he probably had been.

Barry wasn’t sure what he was expecting. A smirk, a wink, Oliver to point and laugh at him like it was all some big joke?

But what he saw instead was the smallest, shyest grin he thought had ever crossed Oliver Queen’s face. Then he turned right back around and started talking to Tommy Merlyn.

And then the bell rang. Oh great, how was he supposed to focus on math class _now_?


End file.
